Election Charade Ends: U.S. Ruling Class Wins Again
https://socialistaction.org/2020/12/07/election-charade-ends-u-s-ruling-class-wins-again/
December 7, 2020
By JEFF MACKLER
On the Joseph Biden side of the 2020 capitalist election spectacle stood
the military establishment, albeit quietly, including Trump’s Joint
Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley and Trump’s Secretary of Defense
Mark Esper, the latter fired by Trump a few days after the president’s
Nov. 3 election defeat. Trump’s ever-diminishing coup threat, refusing a
peaceful transition should he lose, had no takers in the military, not
to mention in his own cabinet. Vice President Mike Pence made sure to
follow Trump’s post-election podium bluster that he had won with
assurances that no such claim was credible “while the votes continue to
be counted.”
Both Milley and Esper had balked in June at Trump’s threat to invoke the
1807 Insurrection Act to quell Black Lives Matter and all other protests
across the country. “Not at this time,” they repeatedly insisted, in
contrast to the moron Trump’s threats and insistence that this was the
time. While few among the ruling rich discounted Trump’s incessant
threats, no section believed that a military solution to the mass
anti-racist protests, which mobilized an unprecedented 15-26 million in
the streets in 2000-plus cities and towns following the police murder of
George Floyd, was necessary. They had other means in mind to corral the
mass hatred of society’s systemic racism into safe channels. The
Democratic Party, the historic “graveyard of social movements,” was and
remains their first choice.
Trump had warned on June 1 in a White House Rose Garden speech, as
federal law enforcement officers fired rubber bullets and noxious
chemical gases at peaceful White House area protestors, that if the
nation’s governors didn’t call up National Guard troops to “dominate the
streets, I will deploy the United States military and quickly solve the
problem for them.” To make his point, the bragging demagogue sent a
relative handful of plainclothes federal officials to Portland and
Minneapolis to momentarily grab and disappear small groups of peaceful
protestors only to be repudiated by local and state officials. Shortly
after, both Milley and Esper, publicly repudiated having escorted Trump,
bible in hand, from the White House to nearby St. Peter’s Church for a
one-minute photo op aimed at displaying his military might. Trump
literally posed himself as under the command of his military
establishment, with a momentarily intimidated Milley – dressed up in
combat fatigues – playing along as if Trump had actually invoked the
1807 Act.
Democrats had more generals than Trump
Biden’s VP running mate Kamala Harris, a pro-corporate Senator and
self-described “top cop” as California’s tough on crime Attorney
General, bragged during her pre-election debate with Pence that her
Democrats had more generals and national security officials on Biden’s
side than Trump’s Republicans. The Democrats, constantly publishing
lists of Biden-supporting military tops and defecting Republicans, made
no bones about who they looked to for credibility.
The FBI and CIA, the new Cold War “Russiagate” establishment, similarly
lent their weight to Biden as did the vast majority of the corporate
media. Biden’s red-baiting Democrats and their FBI/CIA friends,
nevertheless were repeatedly incapable of proving that Russia had spent
a dime supporting Trump, not to mention Putin’s government stealing or
tampering with U.S. ballot boxes.
Less than a week after the election, Trump signaled his intention to
boot the FBI and CIA directors while he replaced defecting or
equivocating NSA and Pentagon officials with more reliable toadies. The
nation’s billionaire class weighed in on Biden’s side, according to
Forbes magazine, with 131 of the super-rich contributing generously to
Biden, compared to a paltry 93 for Trump. The 2020 election contest
included record spending of $13.3 billion, nearly double the amount
spent in 2016, with Biden outspending Trump in the last months by a
factor of two to one.
Republican stalwarts support Biden
Well known Republican establishment figures like former President George
W. Bush, warmonger-in-chief for his two terms of service for the ruling
rich, joined the Biden team. Bush’s presidential credentials included
his ownership of the Texas Rangers baseball team plus a few posts that
he assumed by virtue of his lineage to his multi-billionaire Cold
Warrior father, President George H. W. Bush, whose bona fides included
being the director of the CIA. Biden’s team included former body builder
and film star Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger, who was promoted to the
California governorship by the then world’s richest corporation, General
Electric, and via his personal ties to the Kennedy clan.
Biden’s coalition included all wings of the Democratic Party including
the “progressives” like Bernie Sanders and the AOC Squad, all of whom
joined in 2018 and 2020 to support every single Democrat running for
election, including the most overtly reactionary.
Biden’s racist record
Biden’s history as the Democrats’ long-term designee to align Southern
racist segregationists with the North’s “liberal” Democrats was
highlighted when he was called upon to eulogize the infamous Southern
racist Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond in 2003, whom he called “my friend” and
has recently praised.
Thurmond’s mid-century Dixiecrat platform, when he was vying for the
Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, included the following gem:
“We oppose the elimination of segregation, the repeal of miscegenation
statutes, the control of private employment by Federal bureaucrats
called for by the misnamed civil rights program.” Indeed, Biden was
chosen for the VP slot when he was Obama’s running mate due to his
established skills in aligning to the Democratic Party the same Southern
racist bigots, today disguised with labels like “conservative” or
“centrist” or “Blue Dog” Democrats.
The latter term alludes to a dog being left out in the cold – in this
case, they claim to be left out of the Democratic Party’s supposedly
“liberal” mainstream – so long that it turns blue. This wing of the
Democrats, today representing some 26 members of congress, is a group of
politicians ever defecting or threatening to defect to the Republicans,
who the mainstream Democrats need in order to hold on to their narrow
House majority.
Movement For Black Lives presses for Biden
The Biden campaign witnessed the Democrats’ ongoing capacity to capture
promising social struggles, as was the case with the Black Lives Matter
movement and its associated Movement For Black Lives (M4BL). The
latter’s self-appointed and largely corporate Democratic Party-funded
“leaders” sheepherded unwary Black anti-racist activists and their
supporters among white youth into Biden’s reactionary camp – lock, stock
and barrel. From M4BL’s online Black National Convention, to the Al
Sharpton-initiated March on Washington, to literally every elected Black
Democrat in the country, the promising mass mobilizations against
ongoing police brutality and murder and against U.S. systemic racism
were turned to the Biden campaign.
The precondition for membership was to obliterate Biden’s past racist
record and to re-cast his image as a virtual crusader for Black
equality. Malcolm X said it well in describing the Black Democrats of
his time as “cigars,” that is, “fire on one end and fool on the other.”
Today’s Black Democratic Party officials – Black Agenda Report editor
Glen Ford calls them “the Black mis-leadership class” – are far from
fools but rather the conscious agents of capitalism who have taken on
the assignment of herding the oppressed into the master’s corrupt
vote-hustling machine… for a price, of course – perhaps a corporate
grant or a future petty post in the machine.
Tragically, the same holds for the mis-leadership of the large Latinx
community and the hardened bureaucracy of today’s ever-declining trade
union movement. They, and thousands of corporate-funded NGOs played the
sheepherding role to the hilt and will be expected to continue to do so.
Richard Trumka’s toothless AFL-CIO, for but a few vague promises to
throw a future bone to his tail-wagging whimpering bureaucrats, can be
expected to do the same. In the absence of anything resembling an
independent working class break from capitalist politics – a fighting
labor party in alliance with all the exploited and oppressed – the trade
union vote split 60-40 between Biden and Trump.
Biden’s racist, imperialist record disappeared
Disappeared from these sheepherding politicians’ and bureaucrats’
discourse was Biden’s key role in crafting the overtly racist crime
bills, virtually authored by police “unions,” that sent millions –
majority Black, Latinx and Native Americans – to the nation’s
increasingly privatized, for-profit prison-industrial-complex, put to
work for Fortune 500 corporations at slave wages. Biden was compelled to
offer up a few words of apology for this “mistake” as he did for his
support for the Iraq War, an imperialist mass slaughter that murdered
1.5 million Iraqis, justified by lies of Iraq possessing “weapons of
mass destruction.” Biden’s admitted “mistakes” were taken for good coin
by so-called progressives, because they had once again found a “greater
evil” to oppose.
Disappeared from the “progressives’” rhetoric were the Obama
administration’s multi-trillion dollar corporate bailouts via
quantitative easing (printing money) and gifting it to the corporate
elite at near-zero interest rates. Disappeared were the Obama-Biden
bloated military budgets and their seven simultaneous imperialist wars
for profit and plunder against poor and oppressed nations.
Wedded to the marrow to solving capitalism’s ever-deepening crises at
the expense of working people, the Obama-Biden administration came to
office with majorities in both houses of congress and proved incapable
of advancing the interests of the vast majority. Obama-Biden became the
world’s leading immigrant deporters, frackers, offshore drillers, secret
surveillance orchestrators, and warmongers. Elected by their ruling
class superiors, they oversaw the de-industrialization of large portions
of the country, wherein ever-declining U.S. profit rates were to be
countered by hiring Chinese or Vietnamese or Mexican workers to operate
U.S.-owned plants at a fraction of the labor costs in the U.S. Those
plants that remained in the U.S. or were constructed during the
Obama-Biden reign were subjected to the ongoing replacement of workers
with robots or with speed-ups and cuts in wages, benefits and pensions.
In truth, Obama-Biden laid the basis for what Trump-Pence continued.
Trump’s reactionary nationalist appeals were aimed at workers whose jobs
were eliminated by Obama-Biden and their predecessors. Trump’s promises
notwithstanding, few if any jobs were brought back to the U.S.
“Progressive Democrats” an oxymoron
Capitalist elections are orchestrated at every level – zero exceptions –
by the U.S. ruling class, that is, the tiny multi-billionaire cum
trillionaire class that owns and controls society’s key economic,
financial and political institutions. Workers are periodically allowed
to cast their votes for one of the two twin partiers of this ruling
class. The election game is rigged at every turning point from near-zero
access of working class parties to the ballot or to the corporate media,
not to mention to the multiple billions required for serious participation.
The sheer notion that the capitalist Democratic Party has a
“progressive” wing is utter nonsense. “Progressive Democrat” is an
oxymoron. Bernie Sanders and the likes of The Squad are allowed to
participate only because they lend credibility to the charade. They
joined the Biden team because to do otherwise would end their spurious
claims that the diseased capitalist system can be reformed to meet the
needs of the vast majority. They are band aids on a capitalist system
that cannot do otherwise but deepen its degeneracy in extracting yet
another pound of flesh for its profits regardless of the consequences in
human lives.
Ideology of the ruling class
In capitalist society, the dominant or all-pervasive ideology is the
ideology of the ruling class, the class whose representatives,
fundamental structures, institutions and corporate media control the
dissemination of ideas. It is only when mass forces in struggle emerge
among capitalism’s victims – led by conscious fighters with a clear
counter-vision to capitalism’s endless justification for its continued
minority rule, that the Truman Show-Potemkin Village fantasy world is
challenged at its core. That time is rapidly approaching as capitalism’s
ever-intensifying inherent crises compel countless millions to challenge
its very right to exist.
Within days of Biden’s victory, he and his associates have already
sounded a major retreat from the pathetic and empty few promises they
were able to muster. Today we hear Biden speaking of a renewed
bi-partisanship, of an America where everyone’s needs are met, where
compromises with the Republicans are the order of the day.
Emerging class polarization
The 2020 elections revealed a growing polarization in U.S. society,
registered in the votes alone. Both capitalist candidates received the
highest popular vote totals ever – Biden with some 79 million votes,
including some 87 percent of the Black population, and Trump with 73
million votes, including a majority of white voters. That the majority
of white voters again cast their vote for Trump and the Republicans was
no surprise, although a number of these had previously been Obama voters
or voted for Trump because they believed, falsely, that he would return
lost top-wage jobs to de-industrialized regions, as opposed to their
present employment at near-poverty wages brought on by the Democrats.
The record keepers tout the fact that 65 percent of the eligible
electorate participated, up from the 55 percent in 2016. The 35 percent
who did not vote, however, were deemed by pollsters to be people who
were disillusioned with the system itself and/or people who believed
(correctly) that their vote made no difference.
Another 10-12 million were banned from the rigged process entirely
because they were immigrants without papers. Millions more were
disenfranchised by court rulings because they were ex-felons. Additional
millions were victims of a broad range of voter suppression measures
aimed at students and the communities of the oppressed more generally.
No doubt, significant layers of the white population, including workers
and small business people, have been influenced by Trump’s racist and
anti-immigrant scapegoating, believing that the most oppressed, rather
than the exploiting ruling class elite, were responsible for their
ever-declining standard of living and decreasing economic security. Many
others, however, voted for the Republicans because they saw the
Democrats as catering to the giant corporations that sent their jobs
overseas. A tiny few, relegated to small clusters of neo-fascist thugs
and related hate group provocateurs, no doubt took sustenance from
Trump’s racist vitriol and the cops’ disposition to ignore their violent
attacks on peaceful protestors.
Broad left capitulation to lesser-evilism
Tragically, the 2020 elections witnessed the near collapse of the
“socialist” left, with one after another party or group, crossing the
class line to join Biden’s “lesser evil” camp and especially after their
touted “democratic socialist” standard bearer, Bernie Sanders, another
capitalist candidate with a carefully crafted Don Quixote image, was
unceremoniously eviscerated in the course of the Democratic Party
primaries. Sanders, thrown under the billionaire-financed oncoming Biden
bus which denounced “socialism” and all of Sanders’s modest proposed
reforms of an unreformable capitalist monstrosity, stayed the course, as
he had promised, to the end, perhaps with a future seat at Biden’s
cabinet table, pending his agreement to maintain the fiction of the
viability of “bore from within” the monster and proceed as usual to
champion the “lesser evil.”
To those who spent the past year supporting me as Socialist Action’s
2020 candidate for the U.S. presidency and to those new fighters for our
revolutionary cause who joined us along the road, I express my deepest
gratitude. We have a world to win replete with a new generation of
emerging dedicated fighters aimed at the abolition of the
capitalist-imperialist beast once and for all. Join us!
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