The One-Choice Election
Mr. Fish
There is only one choice in this election. The consolidation of oligarchic
power under Donald Trump or the consolidation of oligarchic power under Joe
Biden. The oligarchs, with Trump or Biden, will win again. We will lose. The
oligarchs made it abundantly clear, should Bernie Sanders miraculously
become the Democratic Party nominee, they would join forces with the
Republicans to crush him. Trump would, if Sanders was the nominee, instantly
be shorn by the Democratic Party elites of his demons and his propensity for
tyranny. Sanders would be red-baited - as he was viciously Friday in The New
York Times' "As Bernie Sanders Pushed for Closer Ties, Soviet Union Spotted
Opportunity" - and turned into a figure of derision and ridicule. The
oligarchs preach the sermon of the least-worst to us when they attempt to
ram a Hillary Clinton or a Biden down our throats but ignore it for
themselves. They prefer Biden over Trump, but they can live with either.
Only one thing matters to the oligarchs. It is not democracy. It is not
truth. It is not the consent of the governed. It is not income inequality.
It is not the surveillance state. It is not endless war. It is not jobs. It
is not the climate. It is the primacy of corporate power - which has
extinguished our democracy and left most of the working class in misery -
and the continued increase and consolidation of their wealth. It is
impossible working within the system to shatter the hegemony of oligarchic
power or institute meaningful reform. Change, real change, will only come by
sustained acts of civil disobedience and mass mobilization, as with the
yellow vests movement in France and the British-based Extinction Rebellion.
The longer we are fooled by the electoral burlesque, the more disempowered
we will become.
I was on the streets with protesters in Philadelphia outside the
appropriately named Wells Fargo Center during the 2016 Democratic Convention
when hundreds of Sanders delegates walked out of the hall. "Show me what
democracy looks like!" they chanted, holding Bernie signs above their heads
as they poured out of the exits. "This is what democracy looks like!"
Sanders' greatest tactical mistake was not joining them. He bowed before the
mighty altar of the corporate state. He had desperately tried to stave off a
revolt by his supporters and delegates on the eve of the convention by
sending out repeated messages in his name - most of them authored by members
of the Clinton campaign - to be respectful, not disrupt the nominating
process and support Clinton. Sanders was a dutiful sheepdog, attempting to
herd his disgruntled supporters into the embrace of the Clinton campaign. At
his moment of apostasy, when he introduced a motion to nominate Clinton, his
delegates had left hundreds of convention seats empty.
After the 2016 convention, Sanders held rallies - the crowds pitifully small
compared to what he had drawn when he ran as an insurgent - on Clinton's
behalf. He returned to the Senate to loyally line up behind Senate Minority
Leader Chuck Schumer, whose power comes from his ability to funnel tens of
millions of dollars in corporate and Wall Street money to anointed
Democratic candidates. Sanders refused to support the lawsuit brought
against the Democratic National Committee for rigging the primaries against
him. He endorsed Democratic candidates who espoused the neoliberal economic
and political positions he claims to oppose. Sanders, who calls himself an
independent, caucused as a Democrat. The Democratic Party determined his
assignments in the Senate. Schumer offered to make Sanders the head of the
Senate Budget Committee if the Democrats won control of the Senate. Sanders
became a party apparatchik.
Sanders apparently believed that if he was obsequious enough to the
Democratic Party elite, they would give him a chance in 2020, a chance they
denied him in 2016. Politics, I suspect he would argue, is about compromise
and the practical. This is true. But playing politics in a system that is
not democratic is about being complicit in the charade. Sanders misread the
Democratic Party leadership, swamp creatures of the corporate state. He
misread the Democratic Party, which is a corporate mirage. Its base can, at
best, select preapproved candidates and act as props at rallies and in
choreographed party conventions. The Democratic Party voters have zero
influence on party politics or party policies. Sanders' naivete, and perhaps
his lack of political courage, drove away his most committed young
supporters. These followers have not forgiven him for his betrayal. They
chose not to turn out to vote in the numbers he needs in the primaries. They
are right. He is wrong. We need to overthrow the system, not placate it.
Sanders is wounded. The oligarchs will go in for the kill. They will subject
him to the same character assassination, aided by the courtiers in the
corporate press, that was directed at Henry Wallace in 1948 and George
McGovern in 1972, the only two progressive presidential candidates who
managed to seriously threaten the ruling elites since Franklin Delano
Roosevelt. The feckless liberal class, easily frightened, is already
abandoning Sanders, castigating his supporters with their nauseating
self-righteousness and championing Biden as a political savior.
Trump and Biden are repugnant figures, doddering into old age with cognitive
lapses and no moral cores. Is Trump more dangerous than Biden? Yes. Is Trump
more inept and more dishonest? Yes. Is Trump more of a threat to the open
society? Yes. Is Biden the solution? No.
Biden represents the old neoliberal order. He personifies the betrayal by
the Democratic Party of working men and women that sparked the deep hatred
of the ruling elites across the political spectrum. He is a gift to a
demagogue and con artist like Trump, who at least understands that these
elites are detested. Biden cannot plausibly offer change. He can only offer
more of the same. And most Americans do not want more of the same. The
country's largest voting-age bloc, the 100 million-plus citizens who out of
apathy or disgust do not vote, will once again stay home. This
demoralization of the electorate is by design. It will, I expect, give Trump
another term in office.
By voting for Biden, you endorse the humiliation of courageous women such as
Anita Hill who confronted their abusers. You vote for the architects of the
endless wars in the Middle East. You vote for the apartheid state in Israel.
You vote for wholesale surveillance of the public by government intelligence
agencies and the abolition of due process and habeas corpus. You vote for
austerity programs, including the destruction of welfare and cuts to Social
Security. You vote for NAFTA, free trade deals, de-industrialization, a
decline in wages, the loss of hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs
and the offshoring of jobs to underpaid workers who toil in sweatshops in
China or Vietnam. You vote for the assault on public education and the
transfer of federal funds to for-profit and Christian charter schools. You
vote for the doubling of our prison population, the tripling and quadrupling
of sentences and huge expansion of crimes meriting the death penalty. You
vote for militarized police who gun down poor people of color with impunity.
You vote against the Green New Deal and immigration reform. You vote for
limiting a woman's right to abortion and reproductive rights. You vote for a
segregated public-school system in which the wealthy receive educational
opportunities and poor people of color are denied a chance. You vote for
punitive levels of student debt and the inability to free yourself of debt
obligations through bankruptcy. You vote for deregulating the banking
industry and the abolition of Glass-Steagall. You vote for the for-profit
insurance and pharmaceutical corporations and against universal health care.
You vote for bloated defense budgets. You vote for the use of unlimited
oligarchic and corporate money to buy our elections. You vote for a
politician who during his time in the Senate abjectly served the interests
of MBNA, the largest independent credit card company headquartered in
Delaware, which also employed Biden's son Hunter.
There are no substantial political differences between the Democrats and
Republicans. We have only the illusion of participatory democracy. The
Democrats and their liberal apologists adopt tolerant positions on issues
regarding race, religion, immigration, women's rights and sexual identity
and pretend this is politics. The right wing uses those on the margins of
society as scapegoats. The culture wars mask the reality. Both parties are
full partners in the reconfiguration of American society into a form of
neofeudalism. It only depends on how you want it dressed up.
"By fostering an illusion among the powerless classes" that it can make
their interests a priority, the Democratic Party "pacifies and thereby
defines the style of an opposition party in an inverted totalitarian
system," political philosopher Sheldon Wolin writes.
The Democrats will once again offer up a least-worst alternative while, in
fact, doing little or nothing to thwart the march toward corporate
totalitarianism. What the public wants and deserves will again be ignored
for what the corporate lobbyists demand. If we do not respond soon to the
social and economic catastrophe that has been visited on most of the
population, we will be unable to thwart the rise of corporate tyranny and a
Christian fascism.
We need to reintegrate those who have been pushed aside back into the
society, to heal the ruptured social bonds, to give workers dignity,
empowerment and protection. We need a universal health care system,
especially as we barrel toward a global pandemic. We need programs that
provide employment with sustainable wages, job protection and pensions. We
need quality public education for all Americans. We need to rebuild our
infrastructure and end the squandering of our resources on war. We need to
halt corporate pillage and regulate Wall Street and corporations. We need to
respond with radical and immediate measures to curb carbon emissions and
save ourselves from ecocide and extinction. We don't need a "Punch and Judy"
show between Trump and Biden. But that, along with corporate tyranny, is
what we seem fated to get, unless we take to the streets and tear the house
down.
Chris Hedges
Columnist
Chris Hedges is a Truthdig columnist, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, a
New York Times best-selling author, a professor in the college degree
program offered to New Jersey state prisoners by Rutgers.
